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We are familiar with the plaint of the woman who, wanting only to be held by her partner, finds repeatedly that he becomes sexually aroused in the process and wants to make love instead of playing a maternal role. “Why did you have to go and spoil everything?” she asks him.
The little boy, poised equidistant from his preoedipal and oedipal yearnings, finds himself in the same dilemma. At first, he responds to his own deeply felt yearning for maternal closeness and tenderness, then his own sexual nature also responds, confusing him and evoking anxiety. “Why did you have to go and spoil everything?” the preoedipal self asks. On the other hand, if he moves toward his mother in response to his oedipal yearnings, the regressive implications pose a different kind of threat. These same themes are manifest in the clinical material of the adult male patient.
His defense against this untenable position may take the form of a pseudoschizoid emotional detachment, one that allows his male sexuality to survive and develop, but at the cost of nurturant and affectional strivings vis-à-vis his mother and, later, toward women in general.
The true schizoid personality arises much earlier, when the self of the preoedipal child feels chronically endangered by the not good-enough object and so denies the attachment itself. Other areas of ego development are protected by the splitting off from the overly frustrating or threatening object and the traumatic affects engendered by the interpersonal situation. The grandiose self as a pathological, defensive structure develops and takes the place of the human other.
In the case of the pseudoschizoid solution of the little boy described at the outset of this paper, affectional and nurturant strivings are repressed, and although the intellect may become overly